Zizek For and Against Lefort and the Monarch, II

(I’ve started a new post to preserve the formatting to make it easier to read…)

Here is what Zizek says in Zizek! about SOI:

“…Although, I’m more and more self-critical of the first one [SOI]. It’s still too liberal. I’m for democracy there, I’m ashamed. I’m very sorry to say, [in that book] I think that there was a thing called totalitarianism which was bad, and I think there should be pluralism in society; My God, what am I talking there? I mean, you know that Marx Brothers’ joke?  – I would never be a member of a club that…you know… If I were not myself I would arrest myself.”

Now, that to me sounds like a couple of things that a liberal would endorse. But if that’s not enough to convince you that Z thinks SOI is liberal, here’s the quote from the forward of TKN:

…the underlying ethical position of The Sublime Object of Ideology, in it’s focus on the figure of Antigone, remains “phallagocentric.”

This philosophical weakness is closely linked to the remainders of the liberal-democratic political stance: SOI oscillates between Marxism proper and praise of “pure” democracy, including a critique of “totalitarianism” along the lines of Claude Lefort. It took me years of hard work to identify and liquidate these dangerous residues of bourgeois ideology clearly…(xviii).

It’s clear from the quotes above found in TKN and Parallax that this faith in Lefort is still present in TKN, and gone ‘years later’ in Parallax. This preface was written in 2g2, the year of Z’s self-proclaimed Leninist turn, and the “hard road to dialectical materialism” (the title of section 1 of the forward) ends with Lenin, while TKN ends with Hegel’s monarch.

If that’s not enough, lets look at the quote that follows the section that I originally quoted and you’ve put forward at length against my reading:

In the face of the apparent worldwide triumph of liberal-capitalist ideology, it would be far more productive to recall Hegel’s dictum that a political movement gains victory when it splits. The moment of liberal-democracy’s triumph [liberal-democracy’s triumph!!?], the moment when it its external  adversary, incarnated in the Communist “Evil Empire”, disintegrated, is in itself… the moment of confrontation with its immanent limit its own weaknesses can no longer be exculpated by means of comparison with “Them”. In the West as well as the East, we are already witnessing new political movements which are “events” in the sense elaborated by Alain Badiou: emergences of something that cannot be integrated into the existing ideological frameworks, signs of the New, the pathbreaking character of which is attested by the very fact that they no not know what they are the signs of and therefore often take refuge in the language of the past; it suffices to mention the Green movement (TKN, 270).

Clearly he’s talking about the breakup of Yugoslavia (“In the West as well as the East”; the dissolution of communism) and his involvement with the Liberal Party in Slovenia.  And it’s also clear that he sees the ‘triumph of liberal-democracy’ in it.

First, let me point out that it does not suffice to point to the “Green movement” to prove that “new social movements” can’t be absorbed by the logic of Capitalism. Rather, it provides an argument for the exact opposite. The Green Party, for example, began as strongly anti-capitalist, but is now a mainstream neo-liberal party:

The Green Party comes from a noble tradition: 1970s radicals who saw capitalism was destroying the earth, and rejected the growth-at-any-cost priorities of both sides of the Cold War. The Greens’ answer was a rainbow-coalition of social justice: anti-nuclear, anti-militarist, feminist, and pro-local development and social ecology. Greens advocated a wholesale shift from development-based growth to a sustainable, harmonious non-capitalist society.

As the Greens or closer to power around the world, those priorities withered. The German Greens dropped their anti-capitalism after the breakup of the USSR in 1991, shifting from grassroots activism and party democracy to a traditional, parliamentary model. They went on to support NATO’s bombing of Kosovo in 1998, and – in coalition with the ruling Social Democratic Party – the US-UK invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Across Europe, the Greens have entered into coalition governments with capitalist parties and ended up supporting “modernization” measures to tear up the welfare state (Greg Sharzer, New Socialist, Fall 2007, p 14).

Sharzer goes on to detail how Canada’s green party gets a lot of its ideas from Chicago-style economics.

These are the types of movements that Zizek and his first wife endorse in the “Lacan in Slovenia” interview in Radical Philosophy (copies of which I gave to you guys), where we also find the following:

[interviewers]: …it may appear strange that the Liberal Party emerged from the youth wing of the Slovenian League of Communists. Especially since, in the information bulletins of the Ljublijana Press Centre, your party is described as affiliating to the classical traditions of liberalism [the classical traditions of liberalism!!]. Could you explain more precisely where the Liberal Party stands ideologically?

[Zizek]: Our aim is to promote pluralism, and an awareness of ecological issues, and to defend the rights of minorities. This is the kind of liberal tradition we represent. Not the purely capitalist values of the free market, not Friedrich von Hayek.

It’s also in this interview that Zizek says of neo-liberalism, “If it works, why not try a dose of it? But one should at least recognize that neo-liberal economics is not a neutral technical instrument[…]. We Liberals are the only political force opposed to this – the supposed de-ideologising of the economy through the application of ‘neutral’, technically efficient measures.”

Now, I’m willing to budge on the idea of calling Zizek a straight-up “liberal” (though it sounds like he’s talking about a ‘third-way’ capitalism here), but it’s quite clear what he means when he says there was a dangerous oscillation between liberalism and Marxism in the forward to TKN and the deadlock this creates is visible in the end of TKN. Rather than explain the logic of how a Monarch could bring the “triumph of liberal-democracy” over capitalism, we merely get the suggestion that the left needn’t worry, there are workable solutions to be found to bring about the end of capitalism – we need only push the victories of the left that have been absorbed by “liberal-capitalism” further so that liberal-democracy can be “realized.”

The solution that he gives to this problem, it seems to me, is the shift from Monarch to Party as analyst, the move from the ‘positive universal’ to the ‘Negative Universal’:

We are dealing here with two opposed logics of universality to be strictly distinguished. On the one hand, there is the state bureaucracy as the universal class of society [this is a direct allusion to Hegel’s discussion of the state and the Monarch in PoR] (or, in a larger scope, the U.S. as the world policeman, the uiniversal enforcer and guarantor of human rights and democracy), the direct agent of global order; on the other hand, there is the “surnumerary” universality, the universality embodied in the element that sticks out of the existing order, which, while internal to it, has no proper place within it (what Jacques Ranciere calls the “part of no part”). Not only are the two not the same, but the struggle is ultimately between these two universalities – not simply between the particular elements of the universality, not just about which particular content will hegemonize the empty form of the universality, but between two exclusive forms of universality themselves (“Against the Populist Temptation”, 564).

The struggle is precisely that between the ‘monarch’ and ‘the Party’.

To which I would append the suggestion that the former is of a closed, ‘masculine’, ‘Antingone-esque phallagocentric’, logic; while the latter is of an open, uncertain, ‘feminine’ logic.

What worries me is that this leaves us with some sort of ‘eternal struggle’ between the forces of unification and those of dissolution (an antinomic “battle of the giants”…), that progressive movements necessarily end in stultified, bureaucratic machines, that Stalin need proceed Lenin (which Z rejects). But Zizek points to Lacan’s dissolution of his school’s as a ‘Leninist Gesture’ – that when the Lacanian psychoanalytic movement in France started to solidify, Lacan tried to keep it liquid…

(“We Should also note here that when, in the last decades of his life, Lacan worked obsessively in the formula of the psychoanalytic community, with its strange rules of passé (the analysand becoming and analyst), cartels, and so on, his problem was strictly a Leninist one: how to prevent the organization from turning into an authoritarian structure based on the transferential relationship to the Master” (Preface to TKNWTD, page xcviii, footnote 41).)